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Protect Yourself and Your Personal Information

Unfortunately the power of economics hit my blog. It was under a Denial of Service Attack for a few days before action was taken to negate the situation. As I never thought my blog was of any interest, and because this has happened in the past, I didn’t give it much thought the first few days.

After a few days however, it became clear the path to the server was not down. My ISP recently did an upgrade, so I thought perhaps the connection problem may have been equipment glitches. Turns out there was nothing wrong with the Internet connection.

It isn’t that this blog is worth much. What is worth a lot is what can be done with the website once entrance is gained to the site. Down goes the blog, up goes a selling site, probably hawking fake items at reduced prices. Put in your credit card info, and its all over for you. All I would lose is the blog for a few days, but for you the consumer, you are out some, possibly a lot of money. Use good, long passwords.

A second good security choice is your web browser. Any password storage program you may use including your web browser has to change an encrypted password into plain text. This has to be done to paste the password into the web site that password is used for. Even using only your web browser for password storage, your passwords need to be returned to plain text before being used. If your web browser can require a password before opening, use it, lock your web browser.

Even if you only use a simple password. A simple password blocking browser use is better than allowing your ‘not important’ passwords being seen without someone having to work at it. If someone steals your computer and they see enough not important passwords, they may be able to determine at least one of your important passwords are.

It is important to use long passwords. If the site gives 25 characters of keyboard characters, use most of them, if not all. If there is secondary authorization, I use that too. If you don’t fill in the maximum numbers of letters and characters, you may want to change your password. It is not that in general a password is weak. It is the certainty that any password is breakable.

Use a good password, not an easy to remember password.

It is much better than having someone decide they wasted enough time tying to guess your password(s), than giving it to them because it was not convenient.

If you use your computer on the Internet. Someone has tried to hack at least one of your accounts on a website somewhere. Someone has already tried to steal your computer. If by no other means than checking your front door to see if it was left unlocked, to checking your home for open windows, someone has tried.

The difference between a operating system log on, a web browser locked with a password, and having your bank accounts drained is the time between someone stealing your computer and trying to hack your bank account to the time you find out about the theft and making a phone calls to protect your bank accounts and your property.

The way I see it, I would rather have my computer thrown in the trash as unusable, than give away all my personal account information because I did not want to be inconvenienced for a few seconds whenever I use my computer. How about you?